The Right-Wing Cooperatives

The resurgent promotion of co-operatives will not assist the workers to break the chains of slavery. Co-operatives must either carry on business in accordance with capitalist methods or stagnate. For those Utopian advocates, it is a world of realities and not ideals that has to be dealt with. Capitalism has possession of this world at present. Though goods may be produced by a co-op and sold through a Co-op, they are still none the less articles produced by people who own no property but their power to labour, and who have used up this power to labour in the production of co-operative produce. In return for this expenditure of energy they have received no more than in any other capitalist concern—the average cost of production of such labour power. In other words, whether the work is done for a co-operative or a corporation, the worker is still a wage slave, whatever be the fanciful title applied to his or her wage. The Socialist Party is organised to abolish wage-slavery.

For example, if you form a cooperative to make shoes, you still have to buy the materials and sell the shoes in an international market. Buyers want the shoes as cheaply as possible. How can you compete successfully against companies that produce similar shoes using exploited labor without driving down the cost of your shoes by exploiting yourself? The system must be uprooted and replaced with a wholly different way of working, not just distributing. And we need a system in which it’s possible to produce for human needs, not for the sake of expanding abstract wealth (“profit”).

As long as capitalism exists, producers will need to compete effectively, and therefore to produce as much as possible as cheaply as possible. There cannot be socialism in one country, much less in a single cooperative or network of cooperatives. Even if the members of a cooperative or network of cooperatives are nominally their own bosses, it follows from the continued existence of the value relation that “the process of production has mastery over [human beings], instead of the opposite.” (Marx) Thus as long as “the co-operative factories run by workers themselves [exist within capitalism]…they naturally reproduce in all cases, in their present organization, all the defects of the existing system, and must reproduce them…the opposition between capital and labour is abolished here…only in the form that the workers in association become their own capitalist, i.e., they use the means of production to valorise their own labour.” What was crucial to Marx wasn’t which human beings were nominally in control, but whether the process of production had mastery over human beings, or the opposite. We guard against a system of worker-run cooperatives that produce for human needs like health care, in which “the workers in association [are] their own capitalist.”

The development of Mondragon, sponsored by the Catholic Church and fostered by the Falangist fascists had as their intention to set the cooperatives in opposition to the workers' movement and trade unions, the cooperative movement to be used as a counterweight and substitute for the trade-union movement, so that the union movement would be replaced by the moderate cooperative movement.

Former Tory Prime Minister David Cameron had plans to create the Conservative Co-operative Movement, to steal the clothes of Robert Owen, founder of the co-operative movement and since dubbed the father of English socialism. Cameron's argument was that the co-operative movement is not necessarily socialist and, by using the title Pioneer Schools - after the Rochdale Pioneers - for his first proposals under this new co-operative approach, he is harking back to the very early days of the movement before it was irrevocably aligned with socialism.

"The co-operative principle captures precisely the vision of social progress that we on the centre-right believe in - the idea of social responsibility, that we're all in this together, that there is such a thing as society, it's just not the same thing as the state," he said. Similarly, his statement that the movement will campaign for "public ownership of public services and public facilities", does not mean he believes in state ownership of those services.

Out-doing the Co-operative Party and those nostalgic adherents to guild socialism within the Labour Party , and perhaps even out-doing the anarcho-capitalists of the libertarian right with his apparent anti-statism

"All over Britain, all over the world, something is happening which I find really exciting. People are coming together in new forms of collective activity - bespoke organisations designed to tackle entrenched social and economic problems...We need to break that centralised control...Manchester became great in the 19th century when the words 'Manchester liberalism' stood for free trade and capitalism.

And of course the city also inspired another idea - Friedrich Engels lived here for many years and he wrote about the dark side of the industrial revolution. But capitalism and communism weren't the only ideas to take their inspiration from Manchester.

In 1844, a few miles up the road from here, a group of 28 weavers and other artisans formed the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers - a local store, selling household necessities and owned by members of the local community. The Rochdale Pioneers created the first successful co-operative in the world. And for me the co-operative model represents an enormously exciting possibility for public service reform and the fight against poverty and social breakdown.
A co-op has a flexibility and dynamism that a central state agency lacks.
Like the Rochdale Pioneers, a co-op is part of the community it serves. Its interests are their interests. And it is able to respond to the needs of the community immediately and directly...I've asked Greg Clark, the shadow minister for charities and social enterprise, to make mutualisation a core part of our policy framework for the voluntary sector...Social justice really means neighbourhoods acting collectively and voluntarily. It means people fulfilling their duties to each other through the natural networks, the institutions and associations of a community.

Social justice means social responsibility: the idea that we're all in this together, that there is such a thing as society - it's just not the same thing as the state.

That is my political philosophy in a nutshell "- David Cameron , Leader of the Conservative Party